Heir to the Throne

One of my pet peeves is seeing how readily people bandy about the term "Lovecraftian" without really having much of an understanding of what that means.  So long as there's a tentacled beast or two and maybe some implication of dark sorcery, you've got yourself a Lovecraftian tale.  You can probably blame Chaosium for this superficial notion that the Mythos is somehow about the monsters (or that the "Mythos" is a coherent entity that's about anything, really), but wherever it originated it irks me to no end how badly it sells HPL short.  All the squamous shamblers and writhing protoplasmic beasts are but window-dressing.  At its heart HPL's body of work is about something much more subtle and infinitely more sinister: the limitations on human understanding.  It's about the universe being bigger and stranger than you can possibly conceive of and not playing by any of the rules you think it does.  It's about there being a thousand layers that stretch out above and below the reality you think you know, omnipresent but unknowable and mostly undetectable.  Things are emphatically not as they seem but, having only human intelligence, you will never truly know them as they are. Instead, you work as best you can with the tiny fragment of reality you perceive until something forces you to recognize that all the things you know to be inarguably true, from the properties of angles to the colors of light, are nothing more than a sham you've constructed to keep yourself from going mad.  The inscrutible, extradimensional and extratemporal creatures that populate these stories serve first and foremost as illustrations of this central tenet, examples of the awful things that continually lurk just behind the world we see.  Lovecraftian horror then, is cosmic horror.  The fear is of the universe itself, its workings completely beyond reason and knowing, yet hideously alive with continual action we can never truly fathom.

That said, there really is only one author I can think of whose work is truly, sublimely Lovecraftian.  This man is of course Junji Ito.  Hailing from the other side of the globe and working in a graphic medium immediately contrary to Lovecraft's own love of the indescribable, Ito could hardly be a more unlikely candidate.  Yet he more than anyone else I can name captures the same essence of pure cosmic dread.  Like Lovecraft's own the world of Ito's tales is a place with caverns beneath the surface, teeming with mysteries and evils that strike at us from the most mundane and unassuming of angles.

His most famous series, Uzumaki, is perhaps the ultimate example of this.  The story revolves around the town of Kurouzu slowly being overwhelmed by spirals.  Spiral shaped items, both man-made and natural, become objects of obsession for the townspeople as strange spiral-related phenomena grow increasingly common over time. The devolution is almost imperceptible at first, but it continues unabated until all aspects of life there are dominated by the unrelenting spiral that refuses to let any of its captives escape (naturally by ensuring that all paths out spiral back into the center of town).  This, my friends, is the real fucking deal.  The source of fear is a curvy line, perhaps one of the least threatening things known to man.  And yet in Ito's hands, spirals become legitimately terrifying, not least because of their abstraction.  The spiral is not a living thing or even an entity of any kind, it has no motivations.  It is simply a shape yet somehow its insidious reach extends throughout every aspect of life in the town, finally dooming the citizens to a bizarre and inscrutable fate.  It is never established why or how this happens, it simply does.  Yet the strangely methodical progression of the spiral's infiltration and destruction of Kurouzu bespeaks a certain order behind the event.  Here, we find that most Lovecraftian of sentiments; that there are strange and malevolent (or at least detrimental) forces at work around us at all times which, when they cross our paths, reveal to us the madness that bubbles under the thin veneer of normalcy we see.

Then there's one of my favorites:  The Enigma of Amigara Fault.  This short story could have come from the pen of Lovecraft himself.  A landslide reveals a vast number of human shaped holes in the fault line of a large rock shelf.  People come instinctively in from miles around and begun to be drawn to the different holes, each person discovering a hole perfectly shaped for them.  One by one they are compelled to enter the holes at which point they disappear and are never seen again.  Their fate remains a mystery until a hiker discovers another fault on the opposite side of the mountain with corresponding holes, each one vaguely humanoid but horrifically distorted and malformed.  The story is perfect in its chilling ambiguity.  The holes have been there all along, waiting within the mountainside, yet somehow each is tailored to a specific present day citizen of the area.  When confronted with the holes, they cannot resist the lure that calls them out into the unknown.   No one knows what occurs inside the mountain or why, nor will they ever know, yet the grotesque fate of the missing people is sealed all the same.  The mounting pile of questions with nary an answer in sight serves only to intensify the alienness of the unconfrontable evil that lurks behind and inside even the most prosaic of things.

You can download Amigara Fault here: http://www.mediafire.com/?gr3cuhpr1raraf1

If you like it, I recommend buying some of Ito's longer works.  Uzumaki and Gyo are both completely worth your time, and available in paperback from Viz Signature.

The Other: A Storytelling Game of Alienation

Nicholas Dowbiggen's "The Other" is a free, extremely rules-light take on the horror RPG that is more or less entirely unknown, but deserves wider appreciation. Inspired by the kind of haunting, psychological dread characteristic of the Silent Hill series of games, "The Other" is almost entirely focused on the steady mental degradation of its characters. Certainly, this in and of itself is nothing particularly new. Call of Cthulhu and its venerable sanity system have been compelling would-be paranormal investigators to suicide and madness for more than 20 years. The thing that is so compelling about "The Other" is the total primacy to this idea. While sanity is important to CoC, it is simply a part of larger equation, and more often than not has a way of becoming little more than a secondary hit point system. In "The Other," the psychological state of the characters is the only thing that matters. All other elements are seen through the lens of your mental decay. The question isn't so much whether you have the skills to pick a lock or aim a gun, but whether you have it together enough to do so, and how the increasing pressure reveals new aspects of your character.

Each character has three Progression Stages, emblematic of their decreasingly rational methods of response to the formless evil that pulls the strings behind their world. Each Progression Stage has a number of Threshold Notches (3 for the first, 2 for the second, 1 for the last). Whenever the player loses a roll against the Other, they go down a notch, crossing into new stages as appropriate. Each stage describes the overarching attitude of the character, which changes as the stress increases. The stroke of genius comes from the fact that character creation consists entirely of a 3 page psych evaluation that the player hands in to the GM, who then creates appropriate progression stages for the character, which he keeps hidden until they come into play. So, much like in reality, the players don't really know how they're going to respond once they snap, and the ramifications are much more personal and character driven than CoC's "run screaming" or "go catatonic" sanity effects. It also contributes to mechanically aided character development, as each progression stage reveals something about your character's unconscious mind.

On a similar note, each character has a Stress-Perception Symptom and a Repression Symptom which are unknown to the player but shape the way that the game plays out. The Stress-Perception Symptom is a buried truth integral to their personal story that they must cut through the Other's machinations to uncover. More interestingly, the Repression Symptom is a lie, something important that they believe to be true, but that is in fact a self-deception they must overcome.

The combination of the Progression Stages and Repression Symptoms makes every character delightfully unstable, creating one of the few roleplaying experiences I can think of in which the players themselves are unreliable narrators. I cannot stress highly enough how cool this is, and how much more conducive it is to genuine horror than pretty much any other system I can think of. When a game forces you to question not only the world, but your character's perceptions of both himself and the world around him, you know you've found something special.

Sadly, the blog on which this game was originally posted has been reabsorbed into the seething froth of primordial darkness, but I've put it up for download here: http://www.mediafire.com/?tc5q4m97v144sty.

If anyone plays it and wants to share experiences, I'd love to hear how it went for you.